Patricia M. Greenfield

human intelligence

...the cultural framework of those who wrote the test. In her 1997 paper You Can’t Take It with You: Why Ability Assessments Don’t Cross Cultures, the American psychologist Patricia M. Greenfield concluded that a single test may measure different abilities in different cultures. Her findings emphasized the importance of taking issues of cultural generality into account...

The role of environment is particularly evident in studies across cultures. In her research on the cultural contexts of intelligence, Greenfield, while studying indigenous Mayan people, found that the Mayan conception of intelligence is much more collective than the conception of intelligence in European or North American cultures. To the Maya, much of being intelligent involves being able to...